Category: Flat Amount

Taking Submissions: Strange Horizons: Wuxia & Xianxia Special

Deadline: March 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 10¢/word USD, Poetry: $50 per poem, Non-Fiction: $50 for a column, $40 for a reprinted essay, $150 for an original essay, $45 to an interviewer, and $45 to an interviewee, $20 to a roundtable moderator, and $20 to each other contributor
Theme: Stories that fit in wuxia and xianxia fiction

Imagine yourself as a sword fighter, a vigilante hero and upholder of justice. Imagine you are a xia in the world of jianghu—whether a solitary traveller on a mission, an outlaw on the run, or a member of a powerful sect or dying clan. Or imagine you are a Daoist cultivator, soaring across the sky atop swords and clouds, with a story that stretches across realms and even lifetimes.

Welcome to the Wuxia & Xianxia Special, fellow walkers of the jianghu.

Many of us have become fans of wuxia and xianxia fiction ever since we first encountered eminent wuxia and xianxia authors like Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Huan Zhu Lou Zhu. Others among us fell in love with these genres through films from the Shaw Brothers Studio, Pili puppet shows, drama adaptations, RPGs, manhua, and other kinds of popular media.

Over the past decade, there has also been a new and revived interest in the xianxia genre with the rise of web novels, and more recently, through the lens of danmei, as shown by the popularity of dramas like The Untamed.

For this special issue, we are interested in:

  • Traditional and new approaches to wuxia and xianxia fiction
  • Stories full of action, conflict, drama, and intrigue
  • Rich, diverse, colourful, and nuanced worldbuilding, whether featuring the jianghu, a xianxia world, the imperial court, or other kinds of setting
  • Unique approaches to classic wuxia themes like honour, free love, good versus evil, and individual choice versus fate
  • Re-imaginings of what these genres look like in the 21st century
  • Works that experiment with, subvert, and reinvent genre tropes, including in combination with other Sinophone literary traditions such as danmei, chuanyue (time travel), gong’an fiction (court case), and beyond

The editors for the Wuxia/Xianxia Special invite you to submit fictionpoetrytranslations, and nonfiction.
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Taking Submissions: CloisterFox #3

Deadline: January 31st, 2023
Payment: £30 plus a copy of the zine
Theme: Ruins
Note: British authors and authors of other nationalities living in Britain

Submissions are open until midnight GMT on the 31st of Jan 2023.

The theme of issue two is ruins. We want crumbling castle ramparts and wrecks haunting the sea bed. Give us derelict shopping centres and condemned flats. And don’t forget, people can be ruins too.

We’re looking for submissions from British authors and authors of other nationalities living in Britain. We are particularly keen to hear from under-represented groups, including BIPOC, LGBT, and disabled writers.

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Taking Submissions: Unleashed 2023 Spring Anthology

Deadline: February 3rd, 2023
Payment: $25 or royalty share
Theme: Water-related horror stories

Skywatcher Press launched the themed anthology series, UNLEASHED featuring top notch fiction by new and established authors. 

We are seek stories across the wide possibilities of the horror landscape. Our goal is to terrify readers, make their skin crawl, and keep them on the edge of their seats.   

Stories can be up to 10,000 words, and we will make exceptions for longer. 

Once selected, pay will be $25 per story or royalty share. This is determined by volume.

We are eagerly awaiting your most twisted, nightmarish creations! 

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Ongoing Submissions: Vast Chasm Magazine

Payment: $50
Theme: bold work that explores the expansive human experience

Vast strives to be an engaged literary press that explores the expansive human experience and celebrates complex, diverse voices.

Our mission is to publish bold work, champion distinct artists, and cultivate literary community.

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Taking Submissions: NonBinary Review #31

Deadline: February 1st, 2023
Payment: Fiction: 1 cent per word, Poetry: $10 per poem, Art: $25 flat fee, Cover art: $50
Theme: Food

NonBinary Review is open for submissions on the theme of “food.” Food touches every single person on the planet, and can be one of the most fraught relationships a person can have. We’re not looking for recipes, or stories in which food is incidental. We want to read about how food joins people, divides people, shapes those with too much and those with not enough. Who grows food? Who hauls it around? Who cooks it? How is working professionally with food different than cooking at home? There are so many aspects of this necessity of life, and we want to hear them – especially the unexpected, the complicated, the life-changing.

All submissions must have a clear relationship to our theme, and be double-spaced in 12pt Times New Roman or they will be rejected. NonBinary Review  pays 1¢ per word for prose with a limit of 3000 words.

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Taking Submissions: Love Me, Love Me Not Drabbles

Deadline: December 31st, 2022
Payment: $1
Theme: Drabbles Valentine’s Day / Love / Couples. NB: Doesn’t have to be about Valentine’s Day specifically.

  • $1 USD per acceptance.
  • Up to 10 acceptances per pen name.
  • First three to 10 get a $10 Amazon voucher.
  • First to 10 also gets a paperback copy of the final product.
  • One email, one drabble. We won’t look at submissions with more than one drabble, as we don’t have time to extrapolate them into the read process.
  • Blind submissions for the actual manuscript, please.
  • Reprints are OK, but we’ll have no space for “First Published” acknowledgements, so please check your obligations with previous publishers first (if your first publisher is BHP, then you automatically have permission, as long as it wasn’t published in the last 12 months).
  • No simultaneous submissions, please.
  • Include a bio of no more than 15 words, plus one link << this is really important. Don’t include links to retailers (ie Amazon) as the books get rejected when they have retailer links. If you want to include one, we suggest you set up something like linktr.ee (here’s ours: linktr.ee/blackharepress) or bio.site (here’s ours:  bio.site/blackharepress)

Theme: Valentine’s Day / Love / Couples. NB: Doesn’t have to be about Valentine’s Day specifically.
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Taking Submissions: Haven Speculative 2023 Limited Demographic Call #1

Submission Window: January 1st-31st, 2023
Payment: 1 cent per word for fiction, $5 for poetry, 1 cent per word for non-fiction, $35 for cover art
Theme: Speculative fiction
Note: Limited Demographic: Authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups.

Submission Windows

General submission window
  • February 01-28
  • April 01-30
  • June 01-30
  • August 01-31
  • October 01-31
  • December 01-31
Limited demographic window
  • January 01-31
  • March 01-31
  • May 01-31
  • July 01-31
  • September 01-30
  • November 01-30

It’s our goal to publish diverse voices from around the world, and to do that, we are actively seeking stories, poems, and non-fiction pieces by authors from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in the science fiction and fantasy canon. Our submission cycle is therefore split into two categories, where every other month is explicitly reserved for submissions by authors of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other underrepresented groups. The interposing six months remain open to everyone.


Guidelines for Fiction

We are seeking stories in the English language up to 6,000 words by writers from around the world. We favor submisions that have not been published before (including on your own website), though we do accept a limited number of reprints not currently appearing anywhere online. For our two issues focused on the climate crisis, we’re particularly interested in publishing stories from people displaced by or threatened by the climate emergency (see our themes below). For our other four issues, we’re open to a wide variety of stories across the SFF and weird spectra.

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Ongoing Submissions: Menagerie

Payment: $50
Theme: the wild and weird and uncanny not told in a standard story format (read below!)

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art.

RAINER MARIE RILKE, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Menagerie publishes fictions, essays, and poems. We believe in sentences so sharp they draw blood, the strange and inexplicable, the wild and weird and uncanny, words in thickets, clusters, and flocks, pieces that move us beyond caring what others think about said pieces.

Things we like: fictions ala Borges, Link, Calvino, & Sparks; weird lyric essay; engagements with the environment and natural world; poems that explode form; bricolage, masala, & sagul sagul; forays into the omnipresent information-saturated online architecture we live in.

Things we don’t: lukewarm prose, sentences bereft of emotion, formulaic attempts at being on trend, conformity, pat endings, sentiment-drenched rhyming poems, neat and orderly stories.

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